Wei WuXian knew at once that these were the stone beasts that the sects had set onto the acupoints of the terrain to guard the mountain after he had died. The stone beasts were capable of exorcism. They required much craft and were quite expensive to produce. Now, it was likely that all of them had been destroyed. It was truly a waste.
Side by side, Wei WuXian and Lan WangJi walked a few more steps. Inadvertently looking back, he saw that Wen Ning had already appeared.
He stood beside the stone beast, head lowered and unmoving. Wei WuXian asked, “Wen Ning? What are you looking at?”
Wen Ning pointed at the base of the stone beast.
The stone beast was on top of a short, thick tree trunk. By the trunk, there were three smaller, shorter trunks. They seemed to have been burnt over by fire. They were entirely black.
Wen Ning kneeled on the ground with both of his knees. His fingers dug deeply into the dirt, grabbing a handful of black dirt, and clenched it within his palm, “… Sister.”
Wei WuXian didn’t know what to say. He walked over and patted his shoulder hard.
Throughout Wei WuXian’s life, two periods of time had been extremely hard to endure. Both happened here. He never intended to visit such a place again.
And, to Wen Ning, Burial Mound was even more of an unforgettable place.
A gust of cold breeze swept over. The sea of trees rustled as though tens of thousands of thin voices whispered. Wei WuXian listened carefully. Kneeling on the ground with one knee, he bent down and murmured something toward the earth below him. Suddenly, a bump formed below the surface.
As though a pale flower had grown out of the black soil, a skeleton arm slowly broke through the dirt.
The portion of the skeleton arm was weakly suspended in the air. Wei WuXian reached out and grabbed it. He bent down even lower. His long hair fell from his shoulder, masking half of his face.
He pressed his lips toward the skeleton hand and whispered something. Then he was quiet, as though he was listening for something. A while later, he nodded slightly. The hand formed a flower bud again and withdrew into the soil.
Wei WuXian stood up and swept away the dirt on him, “These days they’ve taken over a hundred people up here. They’re all at the top, still alive. The people who took them have already gone down the mountain though. I don’t know what they want to do. Anyways, we should be careful.”
The three continued upward. They came along a few run down shacks standing alongside the mountain path.
The houses varied in size. The structure was simple, even crude. Just one glance, it was obvious that they had been built rashly. Some were so burned that only bare frames were left, while some slumped entirely to one side. Even the most complete ones were half-destroyed. After being under over ten years of rain and wind, with nobody to care for them, each looked like dying ghosts in tattered clothing, looking down in silence at those who came up the mountain.
Ever since they had gone up the mountain, Wen Ning’s footsteps had been especially heavy. Right now, standing before one of the houses, again, he couldn’t walk any longer.
This was one of the houses that he had built himself. Before he left, the house had still been fine. Although it was crude, it was a place to seek shelter from the weather, nonetheless holding the people he was familiar with; the people he treasured.
In the saying ‘the things remain but the people don’t’, at least ‘the things’ still remained. With such a scene in front of him, there wasn’t even anything to remind him of the people whom he missed.
Wei WuXian, “Don’t look anymore.”
Wen Ning, “… I knew that it’d be like this a long time ago. I just wanted to see if there was anything left…”
Before his voice faded off, a shadow suddenly wobbled up within one of the broken down houses.
The shadow stumbled toward outside of the house. The half-rotted face was submerged with the thin daylight. Wei WuXian clapped his hands. The walking corpse didn’t seem to notice anything at all, continuing to walk toward them. Wei WuXian calmly walked two steps backward, “It’s controlled by the Tiger Seal.”
Corpse puppets who had already submitted to him wouldn’t be controlled by the Tiger Seal. Likewise, corpse puppets who had submitted to the Tiger Seal wouldn’t listen to his commands. The rules were simple: first come, first served.
Wen Ning shot forward. With a roar, he tore its head off. Right after, low bellows came from all around them. From amid the black forest slowly walked out almost fifty corpses. No matter gender or age, most of them were still fresh, wearing burial clothes. They were probably the corpses missing from many regions.
Lan WangJi flipped out his guqin. With a strum, notes flowed out like ripples. The group of corpses that had just surrounded them immediately kneeled into a circle. With both of his hands, Wen Ning picked up a male corpse with an especially large physique and threw it far away. Its chest had been pierced through by a sharp branch, and it struggled, stuck to the branch.
Wei WuXian shouted, “Don’t bother with them, just go up the mountain!”
He didn’t know how many groups of walking corpses Jin GuangYao had madly summoned within these past few days using the Tiger Seal. One attack wave followed another. The three subdued the corpses as they backed up the mountain. The closer they were to the top of Burial Mound, the denser the groups of corpses were. The notes of the zither echoed through the sky above the black forest as crows flew off. Almost two hours later, they finally had some time to rest.
Sitting atop one of the destroyed stone beasts, Wei WuXian sighed as he mocked himself, “I’ve always been the one using this to deal with others. Today it’s finally my turn to have others use it against me. Now I know just how obnoxious the Tiger Seal is. If I were them, I would’ve wanted to kill the person who created this damn thing as well.”
Lan WangJi put his guqin away. He pulled out a sword from within his sleeves and passed it to him, “To protect yourself.”
Wei WuXian took it over. It was Suibian. After the day when it had been used to cut the melon, Wei WuXian tossed it to the side. Lan WangJi put it away again. He unsheathed the sword and stared for a while at the snowy blade before sheathing it back inside right away, smiling, “Thank you.”
He wore it by his waist and didn’t seem like he was going to use it. Seeing how Lan WangJi looked at him, he fiddled with his hair and explained, “I haven’t used a sword in so many years. I’m not used to it.” As he spoke, he sighed again, “Alright. The real reason is that my current body is low in spiritual energy. Even if there’s a high level sword, it won’t be able to make the best use of it. And so, it’ll be up to HanGuang-Jun to protect the delicate man that I am.”
Lan WangJi, “…”
After the delicate man sat for a while, he finally stood up, bracing a hand against his knees. The three walked farther up and finally, at the end of the path, they saw a cave with a dark opening.
The mouth of the cave was around fifty feet in both height and width. Before they were even near, they could feel a cold breeze in front of them. They could almost hear the blurry sounds of human moans.
This was the legendary den where the YiLing Patriarch made humans into his corpses and did the deeds that even the Heavens couldn’t tolerate—the Demon-Slaughtering Cave.
The ceiling of the cave was broad. The three held their breaths and snuck inside. Nobody made a noise, but the human voices coming from the depths of the cave grew louder.